If
one wishes to tie Ottawa writer Rhonda Douglas’ trade poetry collection, Some Days I Think I Know Things: The Cassandra Poems (Winnipeg MB: Signature Editions, 2006) to her follow-up,
the poetry chapbook (part of a larger work-in-progress) How to Love a Lonely Man (Ottawa ON: Apt. 9 Press, 2013), the theme
is rather obvious—one of connections attempted, achieved, failed and finally
lost. Given that the narrator of her first trade collection was the legendary
Cassandra of Greek mythology, doomed to have her predictions (and those of her
descendants) never believed, how distant is that from a contemporary voice that
opens Douglas’ poem “One Year Later”:

A list of all the things I still want

to tell you: how Viagra ruins

any sentence it’s in; reading Dante

again, I’ve allocated a new circle for strip
malls,

another where everyone’s giving a keynote
address.

The
eleven short narratives that make up How
to Love a Lonely Man exist less as a manual than a series of warnings, such
as in the title poem, that includes: “Stroke / the greying temples of the head
on your lap, don’t say / Christmas, don’t imply there are weeks to come.”
Another poem, “How to Love an Anxious Man” includes: “The tick of his heart to not sure, not sure. / After sex, he’s
twitchy, some country music / star’s cousin.” There are some deep hopes, bad
fortune and ill-fated choices within the lines of these poems, and hers is a
narrator that wishes for something that even she knows is not nearly enough.
It’s as though her narrator exists in a kind of Victorian longing: a blend of
pessimism, romantic ideals and pragmatism. A recent episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation included
one of the main characters discussing marriage, how you shouldn’t marry the
person you can live with, but the person you can’t live without.

Given
that Douglas has been working the past couple of years to complete a manuscript
of short fiction, I’m curious to see how close the narrators of these two works
are in tone, writing from the perspective of being so close to something that
remains impossible, and entirely out of reach. It suggests that Douglas favours
the voice of the voiceless: those who haven’t had much of a voice, she who
spent her time not being considered, offered, or listened to at all. Throughout
the small collection, there are parts of the chapbook that are quite striking,
and other parts that feel a bit too loose and conversational, which might
entirely be an argument of style. Her narrator expresses disappointment, grief
and even rage, and hopefully manages to put the whole sordid business behind
her. In the final poem in the collection, “A Few Uses for It When It’s Done,”
she ends with: